Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday July 29, 2009 @05:24AM
from the looking-forward-to-tech-5 dept.

notthatwillsmith writes "It's difficult to think of a single category of application that's driven the pace of desktop hardware development further and faster than first-person shooters. Maximum PC examined the evolution of FPS engines, looking back at the key technologies that brought games from the early sprite-based days of Doom to the fully 3D-rendered African Savannah as rendered by Far Cry 2's Dunia engine. It's truly amazing how far the state of the art has moved in the last 16 years."

Oh great, another ignorant person against history. History is where we can learn from the mistakes of others so we dont repeat them. Why do you think most successful people know most of the history within their domain? History also allows us to put things into perspective and respect what has come before us, as well as thinking about whats coming next.

P.S. Global warming is a fraud, there is no such thing. It would happen with or without human action, the whole solar system is heating up, our magnetic shiel

I miss Wolfenstein 3D (the original game) in the list. AFAIK that was the 1st 3D FPS some time before DOOM. I understand that "From DOOM to Dunia" alliterates better, but to disregard Wolfenstein 3D alltogether?

Title of Article: Doom to Dunia: A Visual History of 3D Game EnginesFTA: "Now, we know what you're thinking, and we're well aware that game engines existed prior to Doom's release in 1993; we're even going to cover some. But it was id Software's now legendary first-person shooter that pushed reusable 3D game engines as a viable programming model, and videogame development has never been the same since then."

Yeah, I found that a bit odd. Wolfenstein 3D was the game that made EVERYBODY want 3D games It wasn't the first by far (even from id) but it was ridiculously fast, did 256 colours, and easy to play. I tried playing Catacombs 3D, which they released the year before, and it was just no fun. I've never tried Hovertank 3D.

Wolfenstein's engine also got used in a lot of places and extended in sometimes-interesting ways. ROTT was a good example.

That was an illusion. There's a reason there are bridges/underpasses in Doom - the engine couldn't support it. The Build engine was the first "2.5D" engine I'm aware of that somehow cheated this and added the ability to have rooms over rooms.

True, but Doom didn't allow any actual Z overlap in the maps.. it you look at the levels from a top-down perspective, they laid out flat.

IIRC, the mouse was still coming into acceptance as an input mechanism on DOS desktops around the time Doom came out, so it wasn't that big a deal. This could have been a contributing factor to while Wolf3D wasn't pushed harder on the input side, ie: you could completely play the game on a keyboard.

There are vertical points in Doom, but they're faked. You can't actually look up/down (in the original; some source ports added this feature). The game engine ignores the fake z axis when determining collision (so to hit the imps towards the end of E1M1, you're actually aiming at the wall below them, but they're magically hit anyways).

Doom may have looked more 3D than Wolfenstein, but the gameplay was pure 2D still.

These seem to me to be worthy of a mention, at least an opening paragraph. So, probably, is Maze War (1973!) - just limited box-drawing, but a display of 3D and a widely-used technique.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War [wikipedia.org]

I remember playing Stellar 7 [wikipedia.org] before Starglider (doesn't mean that's the order they were released, of course).

Marathon [wikipedia.org] by Bungie Software is another one that is often forgotten -- probably because it was only available for Apple Macintosh initially (1994). Frankly, it blew Doom out of the water with better storyline, graphics, and 8 person multi-player deathmatch -- appletalk network, no tcp/ip support.

Not sure if Marathon would qualify as a 'game engine' for this list, though the game engine for Marat

Even Wolf3D wasn't the very first - id published a game under Softdisk called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_3-D [slashdot.org]
>Catacomb 3-D with EGA graphics and Adlib sound in 1991. That was probably the first textbook example of a first-person shooter as it's currently understood. That said, yes, it's stupid and criminal that Wolfenstein's engine didn't make the cut.

2.5D . It looks 3d, but the internals of the engine treat the maps as 2d. Ah, the wonders of ray casting. Although I should point out that, while the graphics aren't, uhm, modern, those engines themselves weren't too bad when it comes to running with little memory and processing power.

Although what qualifies for being a 3d engine? Having the full out homogeneous transformations for every model? Or creating a world where the graphics can be perpendicular to your plane of movement? It's a bit fuzzy, but I

They list an engine called Voxel, which isn't an engine but a technology. And they list a bunch of games which use the same engine as NovaLogic's Comanche, but it's complete bullshit. Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 (for example) didn't use that engine at all, the just used the voxel technology.

Then they list StoneKeep, but StoneKeep didn't even use a 3D engine.

They call Outcast "A popular voxel engine", the engine was used only once. And showed it severe limitations. How can something used only once be popular.

And for some reason they decided to split up some engines into multiple generations (like UnrealEngine) and keep others as a single entry (like LithTech, GameBryo)

And for an history article they surely didn't bother to put everything in chronological order. And for a visual article they sure didn't bother to find the best screenshots to show of the engine.

Quake BSP pre-processing "would identify empty space inside and outside of the border. This highly effective technique reduced the amount of polygons usually by half and sometimes by much more." That is not what binary space partitioning is about.

It is extremely obvious that the guy writing the article have zero clues about how a 3d engine work. For instance, he states that, with Renderware "a developer could, [..] change the color of a character'

I also remember that game being very difficult. It would be interesting to play it now to see if it's as hard as I remember. I think dretching in tremulous has helped significantly for me to be able to think in 3d which would help, although automatically being normal to the surface in that game probably helps significantly.

People like the FTEQuake folks have integrated Quake1-3 together, which allows you to play any map from Quake 1 through 3, or to incorporate things like shaders into the Quake 1 experience. It's actually kind of neat. Take a look at the screenshots at http://www.fteqw.com/ [fteqw.com] - it's all I use nowadays when I play FPSes. I'll play some Gears cooperatively with my friends, but nothing yet has beaten the original quake experience for FPS fun.

The euphoria engine looks pretty interesting. I've been doing some work with motion analysis, and so the work they've done on it really impresses me - apparently you can code animations using it without keyframes or motion capture, which is pretty neat (if it works). The tech demo video is here - http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm [naturalmotion.com]

Wasn't the euphoria engine used in GTA IV?From the (impressive) tech demo I seemed to recognise the same kind of reaction from the actors.I remember being completely blown away in GTA when I inadvertently pushed a guy near some stairs and he fumbled trying to keep his balance for a while before finally falling down the stairs. I don't think it could've been more realistic if it were keyframed.

Lithtech has always been on the short end of the popularity stick. You grandmother can name Doom, your mom can mention Counter-Strike and your little brother can mention FarCry. Now ask the same group if they know about Shogo or NOLF.

IIRC, it was never 3d first-person games that drove hardware development, but space-flight shoot-em ups. Titles like Wing Commander really drove the need for better and better graphics hardware, in fact, Wing Commander was the one that made the 386 chip a necessity and apparently made people upgrade to play it.

They drove sales, at least. With each game running like crap on last years card gamers spend a fortune each year to keep to the bleeding edge.

Problem is, other than the greater hardware requirements is there *really* that much difference between quake 3 and the latest games? Higher resolution, some explosion effects.. I played left4dead to see what was supposed to be so great and really couldn't see anything that couldn't be done in the quake engine.. except it needed more powerful hardware.

left 4 dead is a really bad example - not much special happens in there, and especially not physics. But look at a game like crysis, and look at the cryengine 2. Can you implement such a physics system into the quake engine?

Much difference gameplay wise? Probably not. Realize that part of the FPS experience is it being a visual experience. Most of the time when new game and/or engine comes out they brag about how many objects it can handle. It is possible that one model from L4D contains the same amount of polygons that all of Quake 1 (as in the number of polygons you encounter throughout the whole game).

Titles like Wing Commander really drove the need for better and better graphics hardware, in fact, Wing Commander was the one that made the 386 chip a necessity and apparently made people upgrade to play it.

Pretty much the entire Wing Commander franchise had run its course before a machine's video card was much more than incidental.

Stunts is one of my favorite games too. I remember seeing my brother play it first on our 386, and then I finally found it something like a decade later from an abandonware site. The track editor makes for a lot of replay value. Sure, it's still grid-based and sometimes it's picky, but it is still remarkably versatile.

For being able to run on something that slow, the engine was quite respectable - it was true 3D, wasn't it? Even if everything was very low polygon count...

Shame they didn't mention the Dark Engine, which was used for Thief, Thief II, and System Shock II, and basically drove the creation of the 3d stealth game as it now exists. Since Thief II and System Shock II are frequent visitors to "Best PC Game Ever" listings, the engine behind them seems notable. The switch to Unreal II for Thief III killed the ability to have large maps, which is one of the major shortfalls of that installment compared to the earlier games in the series. The same applies for the legendarily disappointing Deus Ex II.

The PC Deus Ex used the Unreal engine and had large maps. To port it to consoles they had to chop up several of the maps by (for example) adding walls across levels. Some said this felt contrived and ruined the level design. The PC Deus Ex was known for large, well designed levels that felt like real places rather than "levels". How many FPS feature buildings where there is only one route from one end of the building to the other - as if that would get past a fire inspection! Deus Ex may have featured unusu

The first real-time 3D engine I ever played or saw was Midwinter for the Amiga. It was released in 1989, 4 years before Doom, and featured flat-shaded polygon rendering in a true 3D environment. I just remember the environment being incredibly huge and immersive, and I spent many hours walking and skiing around desolate white landscapes.

Not quite. The reason it's not a true 3d engine is because of how the map is represented. The map is composed of 2 dimensional planes each with a specific height. This might sound like 3d, but it's not. For example, no two planes can overlap in the x, y dimension--no bridges or tunnels with floors above them. So it's like flat 2d map but subdivided in to pieces (sectors in doom speak) that each have a height projected up from them.

Ever notice how there was never one part of the map overlapping another? At any point there was always only ever the floor and the ceiling - at various levels, and able to raise/lower (lifts/doors anyone?). In that important sense it was 2D; a 2D map 'extruded' as a special case into 3D - not an arbitrary collection of 3D geometry. Oh and the sprites, they were bill-boarded 2D also.

Where's the fun? In the 90s I enjoyed Doom, Quake series, DN3D, Unreal, and so on, but the *quality* of the gameplay diminished. Many single player FPS these days are just a series of corridors and rooms bolted on to each other with a terribly linear path as compared to even Doom, where many levels were almost puzzle-like in construction. Many people bemoan Doom's gameplay as "find-the-key", but at least that's a real *goal* and encourages exploration, unlike the linear gameplay of many modern FPS. That

I believe the blame lies in the, umm how should I best call it, a sort of like "geologically active" field of science - I mean everybody is trying to create a perfect 3D renderer and perfect all they have, before they can settle in and start writing good stories. I truly believe this is one of the show-stoppers for developing good games. Look at it - just about every developer starts by actually REINVENTING the wheel here - make their own engine, and THEN build some game on top of it, while the engine actua

The portal rendering engine used by Descent has been rumored to be a simple extension of the Doom engine

Whoa, that would surprise me (not that it's impossible). Going from a raycasting engine which allows essentially arbitrary 2D geometry but very limited geometry in the 3rd dimension, to a texture mapping engine that is restricted to deformed rectangular prisms but allows them to be oriented arbitrarily wrt the world axes isn't a simple extension of any sort. Hell, the enemies were fully 3d texture mapped without any restrictions (but a low poly count of course). That's basically ripping up the innermost guts of the engine and replacing it with something very different. Completely new data structures, and a completely new rendering algorithm... at that point, what of the old engine would you even be using?

The one thing I missed most from all the old software rendered games is how distinctive their visuals are. When everything shifted to hardware the look of 3d games became very uniform, only to slowly differentiate with improving art and tech as time went on. The new programmable hardware again allows more freedom in rendering approaches, and now the top end engines are effectively all specialized shader pipelines. After 5-10 years of very homogenous looking games it's a most welcome change.

The article does not says about Cube and Cube-2 engines: an open source engine, on which Sauerbraten is based: http://www.sauerbraten.org/ [sauerbraten.org] Engine itself is really great and extremely simple. Check it out and go play some games.

All the games people are mentioning which haven't been described in the article are reminding me of a couple of others.

There's Flight Simulator, for one. I had the very first version back on the PCjr. Sierra Online even published a 3D helicopter simulator at some point.

I'd say racing games are an important subset of 3D gaming which have been completely overlooked. There are a good number of driving games which have been completely overlooked. Stunts, Stunt Driver, Test Drive 3, the Need for Speed series. I'

Since it starts with 1990 games and only PC games at that, it misses out
on some very early games, and its entirely 1st person centered, not a must
read, but covers a lot of nostalgia for me. Plenty of games I never played. Just
have to list my fav games. Unreal was just so amazingly beutiful compared
with any i'd played before. Return to Castle Wolfstein wasn't even listed but
was a great game. Then Half Life of course.